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Dear Donna: A Pinup So Swell She Kept G.I. Mail

Donna Reed saved hundreds of letters from star-struck World War II servicemen. Her children discovered them in a shoebox.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

“It has been a long time since any of us boys have seen a woman, so we are writing to you in hopes that you’ll help us out of our situation,” Cpl. Frank J. Gizych lamented in a letter posted from the fog-shrouded Aleutian Islands. “Since we know that it’s impossible to see a woman in the flesh, we would appreciate it very much if you could send us a photo of yourself.”

It was July 1944, and America was at war. From bases and battlefields in Europe and on Pacific islands, soldiers, sailors and airmen were sending streams of letters to their favorite actresses in Hollywood, asking for pinup photos and commenting on life on the front lines.

Almost all of that mail, which studios usually answered with a glossy shot showing the star in a saucy pose, has been lost. But the actress Donna Reed, later famous for her roles as Mary Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the middle-class housewife Donna Stone on “The Donna Reed Show” and who won an Oscar for “From Here to Eternity,” saved some of the correspondence. After nearly 65 years in a shoebox inside an old trunk long stored in the garage of her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., the letters have at last been read and made public by the actress’s children. Ms. Reed died in 1986 at age 64.

“Mom never mentioned them,” said Mary Owen, 52, the youngest of the four. She added, “I had no idea she was such an important symbol to these guys.”

The United States military encouraged the pinup phenomenon as a way to maintain the morale of soldiers far from home. Most of the leading pinups were established stars known for their sex appeal, in particular Betty Grable, blond hair piled high, poured into a swimsuit and photographed from behind, her face turned toward the camera with a smile. There were others: images of Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lamarr and Dorothy Lamour also adorned lockers, barracks walls and the noses of military aircraft.

But “Donna Reed probably came closer than any other actress to being the archetypal sweetheart, wife and mother,” said Jay Fultz, author of the 1998 biography “In Search of Donna Reed.” Since she was also slightly younger, newly graduated from ingénue roles and therefore closer in age to the average fighting man, they often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety.

All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think you’re swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense.

Photo

Edward Skvarna, 84, at his home in Covina, Calif., with a copy of a letter he sent to Donna Reed from the Marianas in 1945.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.”

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

The letters have been cataloged by Ms. Owen. She lives in New York City and worked at Bear Stearns until after its collapse last year. In subsequent months, she opened the shoebox and began to explore the letters to her mother, some of which were accompanied by doodles, cartoons or photographs of the writers.

Reading them “made me feel really proud,” said Ms. Owen, who made the letters available to The New York Times. “At home, she tried to be a mom and not a celebrity, so she didn’t really talk much about her film career or her part in the war effort.”

Ms. Reed, originally named Donnabelle Mullenger, was born and raised on a farm near Denison, Iowa. A disproportionate number of the letters she saved were written by servicemen from her home state, including one who knew her growing up.

“Sometimes I wish I was back there with the old gang, able to go the usual rounds of the week,” Gordon Clausen wrote from the U.S.S. Simpson on April 8, 1945. “Occasionally I will sit on the fantail and look at the moon, wondering how many of our old friends were doing the same.”

Hindsight makes some of the letters exceptionally poignant. Writing from North Africa on “April 12, 1943, I think,” Lt. Norman P. Klinker, a 24-year-old serving in the Army’s 91st Field Artillery Battalion, tried to convey some of the peculiar emotions and atmosphere of combat.

“One thing I promise you — life on the battlefield is a wee bit different from the ‘movie’ version,” he wrote. It is “tough and bloody and dirty,” he explained, “quite an interesting and a heartless life at one and the same time,” but without “that grim and worried feeling so rampant in war pictures.”

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Donna Reed with servicemen during World War II. She was a popular pinup because so many saw her as a hometown girl.Credit
Donna Reed Foundation

On Jan. 6, 1944, Lieutenant Klinker was killed in action in Italy, United States government records show, during his unit’s assault on Mount Porchia, between Naples and Rome. An official history of the battle indicates that his unit was part of a task force “organized at the end of the year for the purpose of taking the ‘suicidal’ objective.” It met with “fanatical resistance” and “artillery and mortar fire of such devastating accuracy that the troops were forced to withdraw.”

Even those letter-writers who survived the war have, for the most part, died. But a small number of her correspondents are alive and can vividly remember their contacts with her.

At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

Sent to Asia, Mr. Skvarna kept up a sporadic correspondence with her as he flew reconnaissance missions. On May 7, 1945, based in the Marianas, he wrote of receiving a letter of hers that made him “jump with joy” and of a visit he made to a rajah’s palace in India; he also sent photographs of himself and asked for a snapshot of her in return.

“It’s amazing to me that she kept so many of those letters,” Mr. Skvarna said. “It tells you something about the caliber of person she was.”

Gauging the impact that the letters had on Ms. Reed is difficult. “I knew she had feelings about her country and participating as a concerned citizen,” Ms. Owen said. But, she added, her mother did not talk about the letters. Ms. Reed lamented to a female pen pal in 1942 that “my effort to win the war hasn’t amounted to much” and “I wish I could find more to do.”

Later in life, however, Ms. Reed became an ardent antiwar campaigner, serving during the Vietnam era as co-chairwoman of a 285,000-member group called Another Mother for Peace and working for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential race. In his biography, Mr. Fultz quotes her as saying that “she looked forward to a time when ‘19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in old men’s battles.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Dear Donna: A Pinup So Swell She Kept G.I. Mail. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe